Nature Admits the Holes...

An interesting pair of articles in Nature.

To me, there are some basic things that any scientist has to do to maintain trust in his conclusions.

Tell the truth.

Do not alter the data.

When you alter the data or "splice together" different data to make your data match the conclusions, mark the change prominently. Doing otherwise is known as "fraud".

Do not disparage or attempt to marginalize scientists who do not agree with your conclusions.

Do not mischaracterize the views of scientist who do not agree with your conclusions. Like, for instance, calling them a

small coterie of individuals who deny humanity's influence on climate.

Do not attempt to prevent the publication of studies that disagree with you. If their study is wrong, scientists will demonstrate what mistakes were made and how. If their study is right, then preventing its publication is a crime against science, and probably a legal tort as well. Either way, the publication of varying viewpoints leads to advancement of truth and science.

Be honest about your conflicts of interest. Getting paid for being alarmist is just as seedy as getting paid for ignoring facts the other way.

When the data show you're wrong, admit it and shut up until you have thoroughly reevaluated your prior conclusions. And when you come back, have a different message.

When you are discussing science, leave out such irrelevant data such as your opinion about how some scientists may "feel" about having to do good science.

McIntyre has doggedly attacked the proxy records, particularly the statistics used to analyse tree-ring data.
Many scientists are tired of the criticisms [emphasis mine], and the IPCC concluded that it is "likely" that the second half of the twentieth century was the warmest 50-year period in the Northern Hemisphere during the past 1,300 years. But legitimate questions remain about paleoclimate proxies, according to the IPCC.

I'm sure the intelligentsia and the Catholic Church in the 1600s were tired of criticisms of their terracentric world-view. That says nothing about the relative merits of the Copernican system, vis-a-vis the Ptolemaic system.

A magazine called "Nature" can be presumed to have a biased viewpoint, and that's fine. Bias has its place. But science as a whole has to be the sum of all the ways of looking at things. True science is based upon parallax.

Biased censorship of a scientific viewpoint is just plain evil, probably illegal, and should lead to both civil and criminal penalties, especially if it forces honest scientists out of the field of climate research because they are afraid of being marginalized for speaking truth.


hat tip, James Taranto of Opinion Journal Online.

Science Magazine and Academic Fraud

It's fairly often that we hear complaints about "politicizing science", generally from the left and generally talking about Bush's refusal to allow federal funding of one particular type of stem cell research that requires human fetuses to be created and destroyed, something that is found ethically troublesome by roughly half the population.

We don't hear the same question when it's about leftists ignoring science or making false claims (Hi Al!) in their attempts to change the world's economy away from use of carbon dioxide. (Which I believe is currently protecting us from the coming ice age.)

Apparently, Science Magazine doesn't feel it has to publish corrections when they publish false or shoddy research that makes exaggerated political claims about "consensus" on "global climate change". In fact, they appear to actively conceal their errors, and to intentionally time their shoddiness to bolster leftist political theatre (much like the Lancet).

A 2004 article printed in Science, but apparently never peer-reviewed, claimed that of the 928 peer-reviewed papers from 1993-2003 in the ISI database on "climate change", 75% of them agreed with her idea of consensus and the other 25% were silent. In other words, "science historian" Naomi Oreskes claimed there was no argument about human-caused global warming. She defined the consensus thus:

“Human activities … are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents … that absorb or scatter radiant energy. … most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”

Aside from the obvious and undenied point that humans put out gasses, pretty much all of her claims were wrong, from the number of studies of "climate change" to what those studies actually said regarding the points in her consensus statement above.

Dr. Benny Peiser, of Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, conducted a search of the peer-reviewed studies in the ISI database, and found that there were over 12000 that matched the term she claimed she used. When the term was later adjusted in an errata statement to "global climate change", there were 929, which is fairly close to Oreskes's number above. However, only 13 explicitly agreed with her claim, and more than twice as many explicitly disputed it, even in the abstract.

The details were even more incriminating, recalling Michael A. Bellesiles's fraudulent anti-gun research. Science, of course, has refused to publish the corrections, or the later studies that show the radically different distribution of opinions on papers published after 2004.

You can read the whole story here.